Popular White Paper On This Topic

Depends on your OS. Almost impossible to steal the keyboard from a windows manager in Unix - it follows focus.Your process would not be allowed to hog it. This used to be fairly easy in genuine PC with XP.

Hi,
by IC, should we assume you mean Integrated Circuit? If so, what kind?
Is the keyboard in question a USB keyboard or one of the old PS/2 models?
If this is a microcontroller we are talking about, then yes you can
program many of them in C. C++ will be a bit harder to find, I think.
Could you elaborate a little bit more on what you are trying to accomplish?

Hmmm sounds almost like you want to do an embedded program like program. So I agree, plain vanilla C would be better - or maybe even better one of the pic development kits and pic programming languages - which would let you program down to mc level.
Allan

In that case you only option would bet to look at the details of the keyboard controller chip you are looking at. Many semiconductor manufacturers make data sheets freely available on line. If it is a PC keyboard we are looking at, then the documentation from the chip-set manufacturer is going to be your best source of information. One point to ponder: If you have no OS how are you going to write the incoming data to a file?